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Saturday, December 27, 2014

Here we are again: the final Song of the Week feature for the year. Like the previous years, we're doing things in a different way than usual!

With Christmas and the New Year's Eve celebrations, the transitional period between the end of a year and the beginning of a new one has always been a cherished moment for being generous. One of those generous group of fellows are people who create Taiko fan charts! They love to share their creations to the world, as much as we enjoy featuring them through our occasional features (like our 'Made By You' posts), so let's give some extra recognition to them!

Okay, Christmas is already over for this year, but this festive song is 3 years old, so we would be still late to the party, right? ... eh, forget the lame joke. This weirdly-titled song (lit. 'Christmas?' What's That? Is it delicious?) is the third single published by Japanese musician Hyadain (ヒャダイン) under the Lantis music label. We've heard of this guy as the composer/arranger of the Momoiro Clover Z song Ikuze! Kaito Shojo -Z ver.-, so this time we are focusing on the song itself rather than the artist.

The '2011 Version' label is put into the song title for a reason, as this is actually a Hyadain remix of a song by the same name he published on Nicovideo in December 2010. This new version follows the spirit of the original one, taking festive songs and jingle and altering lyrics in order to get out a completely different message from the original! The 2011 version's lyrics, play heavily on people without soulmates to enjoy the holidays with between December and February (Valentine's Day). This song peaked at #31 and #49 of the debut year's Oricon Charts (daily and weekly, respectively), making it an unexpected, new Xmas classic for the Japanese audience.

Youtube user taikonohayabusa8810 imagined a possible inclusion of this song to Taiko with a 9* Oni charts, reaching the triple-digit notecount limit with mixed cluster timing signatures in the same fashion of actual Taiko charts like Nocturne Op.9-2's Oni mode.

Ignis Danse Yuji Masubuchi / Taiko no Tatsujin

Version

All

x4 (192)

x7 (300)

x8 (583)

x10 (818)

Taiko 0 K, Taiko 3DS2 61.5-246 none ignis

The first feature is a fan chart for a song that's never been in Taiko, while this fan chart is for a song that's already in! It's a Namco Original that has generated much excitement among the rhythm game community, involved in the epic collaboration between rhythm game publishers. For reference, the official Oni chart is shown in the first video.

Ignis Danse is Taiko no Tatsujin games' contribution to the Final Block phase of the 2014 Arcade Operator Unit (AOU) tournament known as the Tenkaichi Otogesai (天下一音ゲ祭), with Taiko Team livestream personality Yuji Masubuchi (増渕裕二) being its composer. In the same style as the other Final Block songs for the tourney, the song's title is related to one of the nature's core elements (fire, earth, water, wind), with Ignis being the Latin word for 'Fire' and Danse beng the French term for 'Dance'.

Being included in other rhythm game franchises (jubeat, Groove Coaster and maimai), Ignis Danse shares even more trivia; for starters, the song's jacket album everywhere else features Taiko Wii 4 character Arashi, wind god Fuuga's double personality (when his glasses fall off), linking this song to Lightning Passion and dance storm, the twin character songs from the Sampling Masters composers (AYA and Mega) for the aforementioned Wii title, thus completing the trio. Note count trickery is also in the spotlight; jubeat's Expert mode features the goroawase number for Bandai Namco (876) as its Max Combo value.

The official 10* Oni chart has a scary high BPM, but doesn't abuse it that much; the chart is mostly composed of 1/12 clusters and the occasional 1/24. While an exercise in sightreading, it is still a simpler feat than its other tourney partners, VERTeX and FUJIN Rumble. Youtube users elahen800 and CMS-Dhy (夢見霊結) merged their efforts to forge an even harder chart for the song, also featuring several gimmicks that don't appear on actual Taiko charts often, like forced forked paths, hyper scroll-down/scroll-ups and big/small note clusters for both stasis effects and overall visual confusion.

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With that said, this wraps up the Song of the Week features for this year. Keep an eye on this blog for one last Feature for this year, and have a burning 2015!